Sunday, April 15, 2012

The salmon situation

It's a concise overview of the salmon industry's remarkable resurgence in recent years, and some potential trouble on the horizon.

Anyone seriously interested in this business should review the entire report — it's a fast-moving 101 pages.

Here are three key points Deckboss took away from it:

• Strong harvests and surging prices have nearly quadrupled the dockside value of Alaska salmon since the terrible 2002 season. But when adjusting for inflation, the value remains well below levels seen in the late 1980s and early 1990s (see the graphs on pages 47-48).

• Japan once was practically the only destination for frozen sockeye, the state's most valuable salmon species. Now the market is diverse, with a great deal of sockeye going to the Lower 48, the European Union and China (see graph on page 17).

• While long-term prospects for wild Alaska salmon are good, some recent developments don't bode well for prices this year. These include rapidly growing world farmed salmon supply, sharply lower farmed prices the past six months, and recent declines in foreign purchasing power.

"Both economic theory and past experience suggest that if farmed salmon prices fall and the value of the Japanese yen and the Euro fall, it will be difficult for wild salmon sellers to continue to sell wild salmon for the prices they could get in 2011," Knapp says.

25 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Does anybody listen to Gunnar Knapp, aka, Henny Penny? Everybody who pays attention to their business has known all this for months. Why do reporters treat him like a seer? What do we hear from him next, roe herring prices could be lower? Just once, I would like to hear something I didn't already see coming, something to justify seeing this ass-clowns name in print every time there is a shift in market conditions that could be detrimental. I never heard much about him while the market was climbing. Was that because he didn't see it, or because he is a schill for the processors?

We interrupt this program to bring you a special announcement, just in case you have Pebbles in your Mind "The show's title "Bonanza" is a term used by miners in regards to a large vein or deposit of ore, and commonly refers to "The Comstock Lode."

Anyone interested in economics, should review the entire show, it's a fast moving 40 years to the bottom, thought to include "defending the dollar," "New Prosperity," "Strength or Weakness," and last but not least...For the past 7 years.

I like the agenda of the Axe Grinders, where Gunnar's pages 36, and 37 explain it best.

The lowest salmon prices in 125 years?

It's hard to sharpen the Axe, when you can't find the sharpening stone. And of course logging with a dull axe, alway works wonmders.

Thank you to Icicle Seafoods, Inc.• For $1 million in donations to the University of Alaska over the past five years• Which have supported programs at many UA campuses in many Alaska communities– includinggenerousdonationstotheUniversityofAlaskaAnchorage Institute of Social and Economic Research• Which have made it possible for me to continue to track seafood market trends

We just have to continue ice our fish and keep those RSW's going and move ahead and fine good markets that are willing to buy our #1's and we will be safe. Keep up the good work are fishermen that are doing this. Our product will sell it self. Kenny Wilson Bristol Bay drift fishermen. Dillingham

We made our mark in the World market this past few years our good product sells itself. Bristol Bay Wild Salmon has come a long ways it's just the beginning for producing #1's. We proved to the world we had a good product. I look forward to many good years and good prices as long as we keep up the good fresh iced fish or RSW products we offer to our processors. Kenny Wilson , Bristol Bay

To be honest, alaska salmon is so incredibly unique and delicious that I don't think farmers and harvesters will have any problems selling them for a deserving price. With fish that good, people are willing to pay what they need to.

Thanks for the kind words however it should be noted that there are no fish of any kind farmed in Alaska. If someone is selling you Alaska farmed fish this is a fraud. Please turn them in to the authorities.

Of course fraud and farmed always depends on who's reading that term fraudelent farmers...

As any Farmers Daughter knows...many farmers have been turned into the authorities, of course when the authorities are accessories to the crime...it's really no big deal as seen in the lowest prices in 125 years.

I fully concur in JUSTICE STEVENS' analysis of this case...The harshness of these results is well demonstrated by the facts of this case. The salmon industry as described by this record takes us back to a kind of overt and institutionalized discrimination we have not dealt with in years: a total residential and work environment organized on principles of racial stratification and segregation, which, as JUSTICE STEVENS points out, resembles a plantation economy. Post, at 664, n. 4. This industry long has been characterized by a taste for discrimination of the old-fashioned sort: a preference for hiring nonwhites to fill its lowest level positions, on the condition that they stay there. The majority's legal rulings essentially immunize these practices from attack under a Title VII disparate-impact analysis.

Sadly, this comes as no surprise. One wonders whether the majority still believes that race discrimination - or, more accurately, race discrimination against nonwhites - is a problem in our society, or even remembers that it ever was. Cf. Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469 (1989).